


like my mirror years ago

by fleetwooded



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, and Nick Grimshaw/Harry Styles/melancholy, really this is Nick Grimshaw/his boyfriend who I do not want to name here, walks right up to the line of infidelity but definitely does not cross it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 22:37:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18787657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleetwooded/pseuds/fleetwooded
Summary: Harry smiles, big as anything, and Nick can’t help but see it in double exposure.





	like my mirror years ago

**Author's Note:**

> for my beautiful sarah @hitchfender! she asked me for a hozier-lyric-based ficlet and instead i got in my feelings about how people get older and friendships recalibrate.

Nick begs out of the party at 1am - it feels late, even though the music only got good an hour ago and everyone he knows likely won’t be tripping home till dawn. 

Inside the club, the air was sweaty, almost no room to breathe, pink and purple and blue lights casting giddy shadows over everyone. He steps out the side door and lets it close heavy behind him, sealing off the noise and chaos. The adrenaline of the party leaves him in a rush as soon as he takes a breath of the cool night air - all of a sudden, he just feels tired, his feet sore and his shirt all sticky from when he spilled a cocktail on it early on in the night.

“Nick!” Someone calls from just down the alley. He turns, instinctively switching on a friendly but professional grin, and sees- oh. Harry, beaming, looking tall and lovely in between a dumpster and a small cluster of late night chain smokers. He looks somehow perfectly at ease, giving off the appearance of having just dropped out of the pages of a magazine, maybe some chic Vogue photoshoot of high glam looks in back alleys behind clubs. “Nick,” Harry says again, beckoning him over.

“Hello, there, you,” Nick says. He’s stuck, a little, in his radio voice. He had been so ready to bluster through some light banter with another vaguely familiar face and then make his escape into a car, and now instead he’s face to face with Harry, talking to him properly for the first time all night.

“Saw you holding court in there,” Harry says, “I would have asked for a dance, but it looked like your card was full.” 

His mouth is quirking a little, like he just made a joke, and Nick laughs, easy for it even when the joke wasn’t funny. “Belle of the ball, that’s me. Unfortunately it is midnight, and I am old, and I was about to leave more than a shoe behind if I didn’t escape.” 

There’s a wave of noise from the club as the smokers go back in, and Nick looks around the now empty alley, feeling the acute strangeness of being mostly sobered up in the middle of the night.

“What on earth are you doing out here? I know you don’t smoke, Harry Styles,” he says, and then realizes that he isn’t fully sure of that, actually, and he hopes to god he hasn’t just exposed himself as being woefully out of touch with what Harry Styles does and doesn’t do on his average day.

But Harry just scrunches up his face a little, says “Dunno, it was loud,” as though it was perfectly normal to just go loiter alone in an alleyway when it got too loud inside. 

Harry smiles, big as anything, and Nick can’t help but see it in double exposure, his sweet young face of years past overlaying his smile now. Once, when Harry still lived in London and Nick was closer to Harry’s current age than his own, they stumbled back to Nick’s old place after a particularly long and haywire night of DJing (Nick the DJ, Harry hanging off his side like a happy little finger monkey). Nick laid right down on the floor as soon as they walked in, and Harry stretched his long body out on the couch, hanging his head over the edge to stare at Nick upside down and smile that big smile, giddy and pleased that they had had so much fun, and done it together. 

“You should get back to the party,” he tells Harry, “I’m sure they’ll be missing you.”

Harry shrugs. “I already have glitter everywhere I could want glitter to be,” he says. “Let’s share a car.” 

He still makes the same expressions, on the same face, really. When Nick tries to assemble Harry’s features of then and of now in his mind, he can never catalogue any real changes. Harry looks the same, there’s just some unquantifiable difference; in the cut of his jaw, the bags under his eyes, the shift of muscle under sheer fabric. He looks tired, now, the same rings under his eyes that Nick started to get when he was Harry’s age. _How long they’ve known each other_ , Nick thinks with sudden, immediate clarity, _and how little things have changed_.

Sometimes he doesn’t see Harry for so long that he forgets how to think about him. Sometimes in his head, Harry is still nineteen and carefree, so quick to laugh and so unaware of how people see him except on the most basic level. Sometimes in his head, Nick is still twenty-eight and flighty, moving through the world without the burden of failed expectations and the need to settle down building up like a tidal wave. Versions of the two of them that probably never existed, and certainly don’t anymore.

“Alright,” Nick says, “Okay. Let’s share a car.”

\--

They end up on the curb, Nick one step behind Harry as he bounces up and down on his toes, watching the car pull in.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” Harry chants softly, like he just wants to move his mouth, prodding Nick into the car first. Nick shoots him a look, and he understands its meaning immediately, shaking his head and protesting, “Don’t make fun, I’m not that drunk.”

“Whatever you say, love,” Nick says. 

Harry throws himself into the car after Nick, sprawling back in the seat and kicking his long legs out. His forehead is still shining with a little sweat, his hair sticking down to his temples. There's a hint of a flush across his cheeks and over the bridge of his nose, but he looks otherwise impeccable, shockingly put together considering how unabashedly wild he’d been on the dance floor in the flashes Nick had caught of him. 

This could be any backseat of any car, in any year. They’d been here so many times before, drunk and happy, Harry getting handsy and Nick letting him. Every time, it seemed to happen faster, until Nick was certain they couldn’t edge any closer to the cliff without plunging right off it. But Harry always found room, pressing the lines of their thighs together or clutching onto Nick’s arm or throwing his legs over Nick’s lap. Always it was the heat of Harry’s body right against Nick’s, his skin so heady and real, but never, ever, ever any more.

All these years, and still that same old mantra, pounding in his head like an early hangover: _don’t cross the line._

“You seem sober,” Harry notices. “Guess you really are settled down now, old man.” 

The old teasing doesn’t land as well as it usually does in the cramped air of the car. Nick used to find it funny because he thought it was true, but now it really is true, and it makes him feel a bit naked. "Stopped pretty early tonight," he says. “Reckon I’ve done enough of a number on my liver already."

Harry makes a move to poke him in the stomach… liver, whatever, but Nick sees him about to pounce and catches his hands by the wrists, cackling. “Not a chance, get off! You don’t want me dying an early death cause you punctured my lung while pissed in the back of a car.”

“You’re right,” Harry says, grinning and making absolutely no attempt to remove his hands from Nick’s grip, “I’d never forgive myself.” 

“You’d be paying my funeral bills,” Nick says, letting him have his hands back, “and you should know the party requirements are already laid out in my will, it’s gonna be big enough production to bankrupt a popstar. One Direction is going to have to pull a Jo Bros to get you out of it.”

Harry laughs, like Nick knew he would, but there’s something off in his face that Nick can’t quite place. “Don’t you have someone else to be making your arrangements, now?” he says, “Double plots in the graveyard and all? Or are you not at that stage yet.”

And there, the place that Nick’s thoughts have been glancing off all night, is not really somewhere he feels like going. “I like being settled, you know,” he says, inflecting it like a joke even though he means it. “Never have to do the dishes, rarely have to clean up after the dogs, sometimes get breakfast brought to me in bed. It feels like a prize, not a _defeat_.” 

Harry doesn't take it as a joke. He nods as though he gets it, but doesn’t say anything. Nick wonders if he even can get it - if he can conceptualize what it means to be with someone every day, lives intertwined until you may as well be the same person. Although. Harry’s already done that, hasn’t he, with five other people for almost five full years. Maybe it’s just that he can’t think about building that with someone again, from the ground up. 

Nick tries to remember how he felt about relationships when he was Harry’s age - twenty-four, when it’s easy to be brash and reckless. All he can picture, though, is Harry back at nineteen again. Just a floppy haired kid in a boyband. How self-assured he’d seemed; just bashful enough, always so polite, sweeping his hair to the side and smiling up at Nick. How badly he’d wanted Nick’s attention, and how much Nick loved giving it to him. How sometimes he would look at Harry’s sweet mouth and see it as something unbearably sexy and unattainable, glistening or wrapped around something, and how other times he would look at it and see his own young, sloppy, overexcited self - all the time he wasted when he was that age, too busy babbling and covering and protecting to have the kind of uninhibited fun Harry was having. 

All those layers, building up on top of each other - Harry at twenty-four, Harry at nineteen, Nick at twenty-four, Nick at nineteen. What different lives they had lived, and what a miracle that their paths had crossed when they did. What would he do now, if he was face-to-face with that nineteen year old in a boyband? What would they have to talk about? What would he have done if they had been the same age, if nineteen year old Nick had met nineteen year old Harry? 

And - a streetlight changed, and the car lurched forward with Nick’s thoughts - what would Harry look like at thirty-four? Would he be ready, then, to settle? Would he move back to London, where he had always seemed in Nick’s eyes to be most at home, and decorate a house with the intention of living in it, and see his mum every fortnight? Would he want someone to come home to?

“Nick,” Harry says, and he puts his hand on Nick’s thigh, trying to get his attention as always. “We should do a thing. Invite me over for tea or something.” His face is unreadable for the first time all night, a new expression entirely belonging to this version of Harry Styles. “We can walk the dogs, show them off to everyone.” 

Nick nods, says, “‘Course, love, you’re always welcome.” 

“I want to meet him,” Harry presses, “I reckon we’d get along.”

Nick nods, can’t seem to stop nodding, can’t seem to stop looking right into Harry’s eyes, agrees even though he doesn’t actually know if the two of them would get along.

“I’m very good at getting along with people,” Harry informs him, as if he does not already know this, “it’s one of my best skills.”

The lights darting through the car window find all the little faults and cracks of Harry’s face: the laughter lines around his mouth, the arch of his cheekbones, the faint shadows under his eyes. They’re pressed too close together, almost thigh to thigh, one agonzing inch of air between them. Harry’s eyes flit over Nick’s face quickly, unblinking and magnetic as always.

What wouldn’t Nick give to climb inside his brain. To see him in Nick’s clothes. To travel back in time just a bit, just a few years, so he could be a younger version of himself while Harry was this version of himself, so they could be in the same place at the same time and…

The car stops. Nick had known for a while they were closing in on his neighbourhood but here they were at his place, the backseat of a car not an endless in between space after all. He looks out the window, then back at Harry, finding his expression still unreadable and his gaze still fixed firmly on Nick.

They both get out, and hover for a drawn out moment of heady, terrifying hesitation. Nick can’t help but glance back at the house - all the lights are off, and it’s not like anyone is supposed to be home, but still. He has to check. He looks back at Harry to find something shuttered closed in his face; what Nick had thought was unreadable was actually just open, and patiently waiting, and now it was shut. 

Harry signals the driver to stay, and takes a tiny step back towards the car before seeming to catch himself. “Well,” he says, “I’m going to hold you to that invite.”

Nick smiles - almost easy. “You better, Harry Styles,” he says, “we’ve barely had any celebrity guests in the last month.”

“Can’t have your reputation slipping,” Harry agrees, granting him a smile back, “Greg James the everyman needs a foil.”

That gets a real laugh out of Nick, and he feels absurdly grateful that Harry has remembered some of his long tirade about Radio One host dynamics, like it was exactly the proof he needed. _See_ , he tells himself sternly, _it’s not just history. This is still good._

Nick hesitates - he wants to stay here for as long as he can, in this limbo outside his house where he can wish he was young and mean it. Harry’s smiling at him a little. He steps forward and pulls Nick into an easy hug. His weird long arms wrap all the way around Nick’s back, and Nick can tell he’s up on his tip toes because their faces line up perfectly so Harry can tuck his face just a little bit into Nick’s neck. Nick can feel the warm exhale of Harry’s breath against the sensitive skin of his throat, and he feels so overcome with a- softness, a tenderness, a feeling that this will always be good. He hopes, feeling like a fool for the fierceness of it, that Harry will hug him like this when he is thirty-four, and Nick is forty-three, and they both feel how Nick feels now.

Harry pulls away. “‘Night, Grimmy,” he says, grinning again with that ease and playfulness that makes Nick think of the past.

“Goodnight, Harry Styles,” Nick says. “Night, Harry.” 

Nick goes inside before the car has driven away. He closes the front door behind him, a pressure rising in his throat as if his body wants to cry, and lets himself sit in fondness and grief for a second. And then he lets the dogs out to pee, and he goes upstairs, and he washes his face, and he pours a glass of water, and he sets it on the bedside table next to someone else’s glasses so he can drink it in the morning.


End file.
